While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

IN TODAY'S RADIO REPORT: Toxic mine spill contaminates waterways across three Southwest states; Only one mention of climate change in both Fox 'News' debates last week; Ohio Gov. John Kasich backtracks on global warming; PLUS: Shell Oil breaks up with ALEC... All that and more in today's Green News Report!

On today's BradCast, we catch up and clean up a number of messes that got buried --- or, in the case of one story, flowed down stream --- amid last week's incredibly busy news week.

Desi Doyen joins me to cover a whole bunch of stories today: from Jon Stewart's final Daily Show; to the jury's verdict in the sentencing phase for the Aurora, CO movie theater shooter; to the shootings that didn't happen at a movie theater in TN last week; to a few comments from the Fox 'News'/GOP debate that the media didn't focus on because the comments didn't have anything to do with Donald Trump (although one really important one did).

Plus: Breaking news out of Ferguson, MO today and the new toxic mess now fouling waterways in the U.S. Southwest. Buckle up and enjoy!...

While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

We do --- once again --- on today's BradCast, particularly in the bloody wake of this week's domestic terrorist attack at Charleston's Emanuel AME Church. For some reason, Rightwingers don't want to remember that report, much less describe this week's attack at "terrorism". Wonder why. And so does Jon Stewart.

Then, speaking of extremist Republicans, the state of Texas has overruled a voter-approved ban on fracking in the city of Denton and declared such local control illegal. TX Gov. Greg Abbott actually says, with a straight face, that, in fighting for fossil fuel industry profits over people, he's protecting private property rights from the "heavy hand of local regulation." (Yes, he actually said that.)

Adam Briggle of FrackFreeDenton.com joins us to discuss how Denton hopes to fight the GOP's Big Government attack on democracy, local control and private property rights across the state --- ya know, all that stuff Republicans like to pretend they believe in.

"The industry went to the legislators that they have bought and paid for, and they wrote a new law for them to change the rules," Briggle tells me. "They just bought a new law that changed the standards by which you evaluate the constitutionality of local ordinances."

While we post The BradCast here every day, and you can hear it across all of our great affiliate stations and websites, to automagically get new episodes as soon as they're available sent right to your computer or personal device, subscribe for free at iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn or our native RSS feed!

The videos were good for a barrel of laughs. The Director of Florida's Div. of Emergency Management, Brian Koon was forced to engage in verbal gymnastics so as to avoid violating a state ban on using the words "climate change."

In another clip, replayed by Comedy Central's John Stewart, former FL EPA employee Kristina Trotta uses the words, "nuisance flooding," to evade the ban on mentioning "sea level rise." That drew an amusing Stewart suggestion that, in order to evade mentioning that a global warming-connected rise in sea level could eventually lead to an underwater Miami, state employees could refer to "moisture inconvenience!"

The exchanges were hilarious. But there is nothing funny about the attempt to erect thought control regimes, first in Florida and now in Wisconsin. In both states, the practice is verging on that deployed by Oceania's Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's 1984. In that classic but ominous work of fiction, written accounts of inconvenient truths were incinerated inside "memory holes."

While ominous, the clumsy efforts at "thought control" are quite useful. They underscore the warnings we offered nearly five years ago that the real future offered by the so-called "Tea Party" and the Koch Brothers' brand of "libertarianism" includes "Fascism [and] Feudalism --- an authoritarian reality that has already come to fruition in states like Florida and Wisconsin where Charles and David Koch, along with other rightwing billionaires, have already tightened the reigns of oligarchic control over ostensibly "public" institutions...

We're a few days late on this, but its worth it. If you didn't catch this in our laugh-out-loud Green News Report on Thursday (or even if you did), here's the full high-larious video of Brian Koon, Director of Florida's Div. of Emergency Management, trying and trying not to say the words "climate change" as he faces questioning from state Sen. Jeff Clemens (D)...and is roundly laughed at and mocked by pretty much everybody present...

Since then, a current DEP employee has claimed that he was put on leave and required to undergo a mental exam after sharing his views on climate change in one of the states likely to be most affected by it. (Been nice knowin' ya, Miami!) And then comes the testimony seen in the video above, wherein Koon, the Florida state official in charge of emergency management, ties himself into knots trying not to utter the phrase "climate change" out loud, in his official capacity, for some odd reason.

While the video testimony is hysterical on its own, for extra credit, here's the full segment from last night's The Daily Show, as Jon Stewart takes it all apart...

I'm on the road this week, but was able to carve out a minute or two upon learning that some in our trusted news media seem to have lied about the Iraq War! Can you believe it?!

As Jon Stewart declared on The Daily Show last night: "The media is on it! Now this may seem like overkill. But for me, no, it's not overkill. Because I am happy. Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War!"...

By the way, when MSNBC's Rachel Maddow produced her excellent Hubris: Selling the Iraq War documentary in 2013, to mark the tenth anniversary of our invasion, she cited the blatant and knowing lies that resulted in the war. While congratulating her on the fine work, we also took the time to document just some of the many lies told and/or facilitated by NBC and MSNBC themselves which helped lead us into that disaster in the first place...

I'm a little late on this, but it's well worth the wait if you've yet to see this segment.

It ran on Monday's The Daily Show (we quoted it briefly in the "snarky comment" portion of yesterday's Green News Report), but every goddamn thing Stewart has to say here --- and every goddamn bit of exasperation he clearly displays in this piece --- I completely share with him.

It's just nuts... But, of course, stupid dangerous nuts, for everyone on the planet who doesn't happen to own a dirty fossil fuel company...

If you'd like to see the more extended --- and even more embarrassing --- exchanges last week, as White House Science Advisor Dr. John Holdren absolutely destroyed the jackasses heading up the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology(!), along with links to, ya know, actual science and stuff that demonstrates how imbecilic these Republican fossil fuel industry tools actually are, check them out here...

It's that time of year again. Memorial Day weekend. When politicians of all parties love to pretend they care about the men and women they send away to fight and die for wars of political expediency, only to pretty much completely ignore them for the rest of their lives once they come back home.

The latest "outrage" about the various failings of the Veterans Administration is just more evidence of that. The Obama administration has known about many of the problems for years, but hasn't done nearly enough to fix them. Now that the issues have found their way into the media again, the Republicans, who've spent years denying veterans benefits and refusing to fund the VA at levels adequate to support their much-beloved wars-without-end, are pretending to be upset about it all --- now that they believe they can use it to hurt their real enemy, this particular President of the United States.

And that's where The Daily Show's Jon Stewart jumped back in to the matter last week, pointing out that the latest hypocrisy is, in fact, not particularly new for the U.S., not by a long shot.

Our friend Tom Courbat of Riverside, CA (decidedly not to be confused with Pennsylvania's democracy and freedom hating Gov. Tom Corbett) --- a Vietnam-era Agent Orange and Multiple Myeloma Surviving veteran, as well as great homefront hero of Democracy for many, many years --- requested we post Stewart's latest take over this Memorial Day weekend. We are all too happy to do so. It is, quite literally, the very least we can do to say thanks to Tom and all the others vets who have given far more for their country than it will ever be able to return in kind.

As Courbat writes us about Stewart's take (posted below): "Nothing, nothing I have EVER seen summarized as well how our country has managed to screw over our vets, going all the way back to our war for independence from England! You will be blown away by what you learn --- and this MUST be shown for the Memorial Day."

And so it shall be. Both parts of Stewart's epic takedown from Thursday night's show follow below. If you only have time for one of the two parts, let it be PART 2...

Jon Stewart and The Daily Show's fantastic --- MUST-WATCH (just for the crying clips!) --- take on the outrageously absurd and demeaning media-enforced double-standard faced by female politicians over their male counterparts...

Last night on The Daily Show, Mandvi did it again, this time offering a scathing, must-see report on "third-world" health care conditions in...Knoxville, Tennessee...and some stunning Rightwing hypocrisy about it...

Over the years, whenever I chat with one of my neighbors (who happens to be gay) about various issues of marriage equality in the news, the state of Utah inevitably seems to come up as the conversational worst-case-scenario stand-in for the dying status quo.

"It'll be interesting to see what effect the new Supreme Court ruling in the Windsor case will have across the country," I might say. "Will a gay couple who were married in California, for example, suddenly stop receiving their federal recognition and marriage benefits if their job requires that they must move to, say, Utah, for their work? Will the courts stand for a couple receiving full federal recognition in one state, but allow that recognition to be removed simply because they moved to another? That doesn't seem either legally or Constitutionally sustainable...Even in a state like Utah."

Welp, guess we now have our answer to that speculation at least, and much more specifically than any of us might have thought over the past year or three, now that a federal judge yesterday found Utah's state constitutional ban against gay marriage to be in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Some 30 other states currently have similar laws or state constitutional bans on equality for all.

"The court holds that Utah's prohibition on same-sex marriage conflicts with the United States Constitution's guarantees of equal protection and due process under the law," Judge Robert J. Shelby (an Obama appointee) wrote in his 53-page ruling at the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, Central Division. "These rights would be meaningless if the Constitution did not also prevent the government from interfering with the intensely personal choices an individual makes when that person decides to make a solemn commitment to another human being."

I guess I'll have to find another "Utah" for purposes of neighborly speculative conversation about equal marriage rights legal issues. The Deep South states like Mississippi or Alabama might have seemed like good candidates. But between the fairly clear, conservative --- and surprisingly early --- holiday message sent by Judge Shelby in the Utah case yesterday (which is, of course, being appealed by the state, but that will fail soon too), and the awesome message from this Daily Show video from last month, I suspect we'll be running completely out of status quo states all together pretty soon. Or, at least, we'll have 50status quo states...

When Don Yelton, North Carolina Republican Party Executive Committee Member and GOP Precinct Chair of Buncombe County, NC tried to explain to The Daily Show that the state's new polling place Photo ID restriction law wasn't racist at all, things went from bad to worse.

Mind you, the "bad" was when he (actually!) claimed that one of his best friends was black! So...you can only imagine what the "worse" was...

Yeah. Pretty amazing. In an interview with Mountain Xpress after the show aired Wednesday night, Yelton said he was pleased with the way the Daily Show had edited the conversation. "The comments that were made, that I said, I stand behind them. I believe them," he told the paper. "To tell you the truth, there were a lot of things I said that they could’ve made me sound worse than what they put up."

And, late Thursday, as Prachi Gupta at Salon reports, despite initially standing behind his comments, Yelton has now stepped down as the GOP precinct chair in Buncombe County:

Speaking to Pete Kaliner, host of "The Pete Kaliner Show" on WWNC 570 AM, Yelton has officially resigned from his position as precinct chair within the Buncombe County Republican Party.

Nathan West, Communications Director of the Buncombe County GOP, told Salon over the phone that he is worried about the "artificial damage" Yelton has caused the party.

Um, artificial damage?

Gawker reports that Yelton has now also stepped down from his state Republican Party leadership position as well. Moral for Republicans: It's okay to think it and pass laws based on it, just don't say it out loud, please and thanks, and certainly not in front of a TV camera!

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UPDATE: Yelton has a new story. He now says The Daily Show took him out of context (in contrast to what he said previously, as seen above), then goes on to use the n-word to defend himself and calls his local Republican Party "gutless" because says they could have "turn[ed the interview] into a positive" by using it to show they accept all points of view. Seriously. See TPM for more...

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